Buy the Ebook:

About My Hollywood

Claire, a composer and a new mother, has moved to Los Angeles so that her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage—once a genuine 50/50 arrangement—changes, with Paul working late and Claire left at home with baby William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.

She hires Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five, who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines. Lola stabilizes the rocky household, and soon other parents try to lure her away. But what she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.

About My Hollywood

A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage—once a genuine 50/50 arrangement—changes, with Paul working long hours and Claire left at home with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.

Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.

In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, where mothers’ modern ideas are given practical overhauls by nannies, we meet Lola’s vast network of fellow caregivers, each with her own story to tell. We see the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.

We look into two contemporary marriages—one in America and one in the Philippines—and witness their endangerment, despite the best of intentions.My Hollywood is a tender, witty, and resonant novel that provides the profound pleasures readers have come to expect from Mona Simpson, here writing at the height of her powers.

About Mona Simpson

Mona Simpson is the author of Casebook, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a Whiting… More about Mona Simpson

About Mona Simpson

Mona Simpson is the author of Casebook, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a Whiting… More about Mona Simpson

People Who Read My Hollywood Also Read

Inspired by Your Browsing History

People Who Read My Hollywood Also Read

Inspired by Your Browsing History

Praise

“Beautifully realized. . . . One of the most insightful books in years about contemporary American life.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Simpson works habitual magic, showing how love travels, ownerless and unbidden.” —The New York Times Book Review

“This is classic Simpson. . . . The most serious and potent truths are told.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“An absorbing novel. . . . With her incisive portrayal of the frustrations felt by working parents, My Hollywood could easily be Our Country.” —The Washington Post Book World

“It takes a very subtle, sophisticated and confident writer to make our most common problems come off as unique on the page as they feel at 3 in the morning. If anyone can do it, Mona Simpson can. And does. But there’s more.” —Los Angeles Times

“Simpson’s massive gifts—for unflinching precision, for artful indirection and for the deft unfurling of imagery—are on vivid display in My Hollywood, a book that carries us down deep, into the darkness of two distinct worlds, and lights them up, finding all the comedy in the ways they are the same world, and all the tragedy in the unbridgeable distance between them.” —Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“The Hollywood so devastatingly rendered in Mona Simpson’s new novel is a different universe from the world-famous well-spring of movie magic. . . . Alternately satiric and poignant.” —The Miami Herald

“[Simpson] takes us inside what once was called the heart-chamber of the world. The walls of the chamber are touched by beauty, but it echoes with the plangent sounds of love lost, love damaged, love unrequited; and with the sadness of those sighs are the music of a love unfound.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“A darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity. Brilliant, in short.” —Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland

“Astute, clever, wide-ranging, sometimes funny, always sympathetic to the varieties of love and domesticity, My Hollywood will stay in the mind because it digs deep into contemporary life and manners, raising questions about how we live and what we need.” —The Washington Times

“[A] novel of manners about modern motherhood. . . . Highlights clashes of culture and class.” —The New Yorker“One more time, Mona Simpson has burrowed deep into the American family to extract the shivering truth about the many trade-offs women face in raising children today. . . . My Hollywood is vast in scope, exquisite in detail, rife with pleasures.” —Michelle Huneven, author of Blame

“Hilarious and heartbreaking.” —Marie Claire

“Simpson deploys a sharp eye and mordant wit to show us the backstairs view of a Hollywood we’ve never seen. . . . The novel your best friend won’t lend you.” —More

“Simpson skillfully manages to move us with the two women’s emotions even as she surrounds them with wicked satire. . . . Slyly funny.” —The Seattle Times